A good number of musical instruments use a vibrating member to produce melodic sound. A guitar, for example, relies on performance of the mechanical motion of a number of taut strings to make music. A new string exhibits a sound that is referred to as being “rich” or “bright” in comparison to a well-worn string. A number of ordinary factors come into play that cause normal wear and tear on the strings, such as the amount of play time, hand cleanliness, hand natural oil and pH content, string construction and quality, environmental conditions like humidity and temperature, and the like.
Thus, strings not only wear at different rates for different players, but each set of strings likewise wears at a different rate for the same player. Eventually, the strings wear to a point where they go flat, and although they are still tunable, their useful life is expended because they have lost the desired richness of sound. However, the wear occurs so gradually that soon after replacing a set of strings the player will tend to continuously be on guard as to whether they need to be changed again. Changing the strings too early is wasteful of time and resources, but changing them too late exposes the player to not putting her best foot forward musically. This same problem exists for other types of musical instruments as well that use a vibrating member to produce melodic sounds.
What is needed is a way for the player to quantitatively ascertain what the useful life of the vibrating member is, so that she can better attend to making music by not intuitively servicing her instrument. It is to improvements in the art directed to that need that the present embodiments are directed.